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Recent media coverage of e-scooters has been focusing on the dangers inherent in riding them.

“They have been pouring into emergency rooms around the nation all summer,” wrote Peter Holley in the Washington Post, subsequently quoted in the Sacramento Bee, “their bodies bearing a blend of injuries that doctors normally associate with victims of car wrecks.”

“Injuries are coming in fast and furious,” said Michael Sise, chief of medical staff at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, noting that his team saw four severe scooter injuries last week. “It’s just a matter of time before someone is killed. I’m absolutely certain of it.”

The piece is accompanied by a photo of a gravely injured man in a neck brace with a breathing tube. The article quotes several sources, including a former mechanic for Bird Scooters, who charge that rental electric scooters are poorly maintained by untrained mechanics.

The article implies that the sources of e-scooter injuries it identifies– “34 serious accidents” in Santa Monica, “ten severe injuries a week” at an unnamed emergency room in San Francisco—are the scooters themselves. Yet it doesn’t do more than quote emergency room doctors, and provides no real information about the causes of all those injuries.

But deep in the Washington Post article, the author off-handedly mentions a different potential cause. Washington, D.C., says the Post, “has seen a slight rise in injuries related to electric scooters since their introduction but not one as significant as in other cities, a doctor at George Washington University Hospital said — possibly because of the proliferation of bike lanes in the city” (emphasis added).

Nevertheless, both the Post and the Sacramento Bee claim that a bill currently awaiting its fate on Governor Brown’s desk, A.B. 2989, could make things worse. That bill would allow adults to ride scooters without wearing helmets–putting e-scooters on an equal footing with bicycles and electric bicycles.

And each time Streetsblog writers have pointed out another bit of obviousness: right now, it’s a rare city that has a safe place to ride these newfangled machines. If more cities had good, safe bike infrastructure that people on e-scooters could share, how would that affect all those injuries that are “piling up,” as the Post puts it?

It’s easy for people to believe that helmets would make all the difference here. But requiring helmets is a distraction from the real source of danger for riders, and everyone else on the road: the drivers of the vehicles they are forced to share road space with.

Requiring helmets could slow the adoption of relatively low-speed, clean-energy ways of getting around cities that could help cut congestion if they were encouraged and given a safe place to ride. That goes for bikes as well as e-scooters, and is one of the reasons bike helmet laws haven’t gone anywhere in recent years. If riders must wear helmets, those who don’t are very visible and are easy to catch and ticket—much easier to see and cite than drivers who text, an activity that is actually deadly.

The helmet may protect the driver but who is protecting the pedestrian. Can’t tell you how many times the drivers ride on the sidewalk with a large amount of pedestrians downtown weaving in and out of pedestrians.

sfnative56

Whether rental or real they should not be on the sidewalk.

mx

San Francisco hasn’t had rental scooters on the streets since June 4th, so if there are really still 10 severe injuries a week from scooters at just one hospital (the article is written in September and uses the present tense), they have to be all from personally-owned scooters. The claim doesn’t make sense.